Why UK Redundancies Are Rising Again in 2026 (It's Not What You Think)

If it feels like more people around you have been made redundant this year, the data backs that up — and there's a specific, identifiable reason for it.

In January and February 2026 alone, 736 UK employers filed HR1 collective redundancy notices, putting 56,396 jobs formally at risk — a 9% increase on the same two months in 2025. Some forecasts now put total 2026 redundancies at around 327,227, roughly 3.7% higher than 2025 levels. The single biggest driver isn't a demand collapse — it's the rise in employer National Insurance contributions that took effect on 6 April 2026, which increased the rate from 13.8% to 15% and lowered the threshold at which employers start paying from £9,100 to £5,000 per employee. That change made every employee meaningfully more expensive to keep on payroll, and smaller, thinner-margin employers felt it first (coverage via Fair Play Talks).

Official ONS figures confirm the wider picture: the redundancy rate was 4.6 per 1,000 employees in the December 2025 to February 2026 quarter, and the most recent Labour Market Overview shows 707,000 vacancies in the May–July 2026 period, broadly flat to falling since the start of the year and below pre-pandemic levels, alongside an unemployment rate of 4.9% — up 0.2 percentage points year-on-year (ONS Labour Market Overview, August 2026).

What this means if you've just been made redundant

Being made redundant isn't a reflection of your performance — the data shows this is largely a cost-driven, policy-triggered wave hitting specific sectors and employer sizes, not a verdict on individual employees. But practically, it puts you into a job market with fewer open vacancies competing against more people released at roughly the same time, often from the same sectors.

That makes two things matter more than usual:

• Speed. With vacancies flat or falling, roles get filled faster relative to the number of applicants, so time between deciding to apply and actually submitting a tailored application matters.
• Genuine tailoring, not mass-blasting. A redundancy often pushes people to apply outside their exact previous title, which means a generic CV built around your old role is less likely to land than one rewritten around each new listing's actual requirements.

If you're navigating a redundancy and need to get a high volume of genuinely tailored applications out quickly, the CVCircuit Job Search Copilot — free to install, with 5 free downloads and 5 free Pro actions included — rewrites your CV to match each job's keywords and fills in the rest of the application from your saved profile, so you're not retyping the same employment history into a different portal for the twentieth time this week.